Sencha, kukicha, mecha, konacha and aracha: one line, five teas
Japanese tea manufacture is split between a grower who makes crude tea and a refiner who separates it. The separation does not produce one tea plus waste — it produces five products, all sold, all named, and priced in an order that has almost nothing to do with which is nicest.
tea
What is being compared
Why these get confused
These read as five unrelated teas on a shelf, with five prices and no explanation. They are one intake separated over screens on a single afternoon.
Point by point
| Aspect | Aracha | Sencha | Kukicha | Mecha | Konacha |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | The crude tea as it leaves the grower's factory: long leaf, stem, dust and fines still mixed. | The leaf fraction, cut to a uniform length. | The stem and leaf-rib fraction. | The small rolled buds and tips. | The fine particles sifted out. |
| Where it comes from in the process | Before refining. Almost all Japanese tea passes through this state. | The main output the whole line is aimed at. | Pulled out by an electrostatic or mechanical stemmer. | Screened out by size. | Screened out by size, at the small end. |
| What it tastes like | Rough-edged and sappy with real sweetness underneath. | The reference: grassy, marine, briskly sweet. | Pale, creamy, faintly sweet, with no drying edge at all. | Stronger and more savoury than the sencha it came from. | Sharp, brisk and quickly clearing. |
| Why it tastes that way | Everything is still in it, including the stem sweetness and the fine bitter material. | A deliberately uniform particle size extracting at one rate. | Stem material carries far less of the compounds that make leaf astringent. | Bud material is richer than the leaf around it. | Enormous surface area, so it extracts almost instantly. |
| What it costs | Rarely sold at all; the small amount that reaches drinkers is a curiosity. | The benchmark price. | Cheap. | Cheap relative to what is in the cup. | One of the cheapest teas in existence. |
| How to brew it | As sencha, expecting unevenness. | Standard sencha parameters. | Hotter and longer than sencha; there is little to over-extract. | Short. It is concentrated and will turn drying. | Very short and quite strong — the point is a fast, clearing cup. |
| Where you meet it | Direct from a grower, or at a factory. | Everywhere. | Sold as kukicha or twig tea; roasted, it becomes the stem hojicha most Japanese cafés serve. | Sold as mecha or bud tea. | The tea served in sushi restaurants, where it is exactly the right tool. |
The short answer
The price order here is set by particle size and by what a refiner can sell in volume, not by quality. Mecha and karigane are the two clearest cases in the Japanese range where a by-product is better value than the product it was sorted out of.
Not a ranking. TeaHQ publishes no ratings and does not know your occasion.